where have classical music’s uppercase letters gone?

Composers in recent decades have broken with the shift keys on their keyboards.

Jason Raish

By MICHAEL COOPER

March 17, 2017

Composers of what is known, for better or worse, as classical music have broken over time with sonata form, tonality, serialism and minimalism. And in recent decades, quite a few have also broken with the shift keys on their keyboards.

All-lowercase titles abound. Hans Abrahamsen’s vivid song cycle “let me tell you” has been a breakout success of recent years. This month the Detroit Symphony Orchestra played Jeffrey Mumford’s “of fields unfolding …echoing depths of resonant light.” And the uncapitalized compositions of David Lang have given New York some of its biggest musical events of the past year, including “the public domain,” his choral work for a thousand sung last summer at Lincoln Center; “the loser,” a monodrama which opened the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; and “anatomy theater,” which was a highlight of the Prototype festival of new opera.

These small grammatical rebellions strike some as poetic and others as pretentious — at least when the titles are given as their composers intended. (They are rendered inconsistently in many publications, including the one you are reading, that strive to follow standard grammar rules.)

But composers who channel their inner E. E. Cummings and break with traditional capitalization say they do so advisedly — for reasons musical, poetic, political and idiosyncratic.

“I really know that it is a hopeless affectation,” Mr. Lang said in an interview. “And I always feel very apologetic about it because I’m not trying to do anything particularly fancy.”

He explained that he had first started using lowercase titles as a defense mechanism of sorts in his student days, when he was consumed with doubts about whether he could produce works to rival the masterpieces he was studying: “It feels like I’m not trying to say, ‘Well, Beethoven did this, and now it’s my turn to do that.’”

Mr. Lang actually likes lowercase, pointing to his song cycle “death speaks” as an example. “When you write it uppercase — ‘Death Speaks’ — it feels so definitive,” he said. “Lowercase — ‘death speaks’ — feels so mysterious and intimate.”

But Mr. Lang, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, allowed that he “could probably actually stand to be confident enough to use an uppercase letter.”

Poets including Cummings, who abandoned standard syntax and capitalization, were one inspiration for the lowercase trend, several composers said in interviews. So were influential modernist and avant-garde composers who wrote lowercase works, including Pierre Boulez, who began writing his “…explosante-fixe…” in the early 1970s, and Luigi Nono, who wrote “…sofferte onde serene…” for the pianist Maurizio Pollini a few years later. And some music has lowercase source material: Mr. Abrahamsen’s “let me tell you” is based on a short novel of the same title by Paul Griffiths.

Mr. Adams elaborated in an email that he had always loved Cummings — whose poetry he has set to music — and said that the ornithological “songbirdsongs” felt to him like poems without words, or at least human words. He wrote that using lowercase “suggested a little humility on the part of the composer,” adding, “After all, I had stolen this music from the birds!”

A prominent music publisher in Austria may have unexpectedly played a role as well. Universal Edition adopted a minimalist look in the 1960s for its scores, and printed all titles in lowercase letters. “It was obviously the ambition to visualize a kind of challenging modernism,” Heinz Stolba, the head of its editorial department, wrote in an email.

Some younger composers who studied the scores it published by Boulez and Luciano Berio said that they assumed it was the composers who had chosen the lowercase titles — and some even began emulating the practice, which they came to associate with the modern and cutting edge. (Universal Edition stopped using the lowercase titles in the 1990s.)

The Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth said that she traced some of her unconventional titles to her interest in the Wiener Gruppe, a movement of postwar Austrian writers. “These poets started a movement to write against the destructive conventions of language of Nazism and therefore started to write in lowercase letters again,” she explained in an email.

The group, some of whose members were friends of her parents, broke with conventions to fight against what they saw as “stillstand,” or stagnation, in the arts. And when she set out to make her mark in Europe’s male-dominated composing landscape in the 1980s and early 1990s — “as a lone young female ‘cowgirl’ in this music scene,” she said — she embraced nonstandard titles as way to break with what she saw as a type of musical “stillstand.”

Mr. Mumford, whose cello concerto “of fields unfolding … echoing depths of resonant light (in memoriam Elliott Carter)” was played this month in Detroit, said that he used lowercase letters for nearly all of his works because they fit his conception of the music.

“I look at it in terms of an experience that you’re walking into that’s already progressing,” he explained. “A capital letter is kind of an impediment.”

But just as bell hooks, the feminist writer, and k. d. lang, the singer-songwriter, often see their names appear with unwanted capital letters, lowercase compositions are often capitalized on their way to publication.

“It’s a dilemma for us, as it is, I think, for everyone,” said Mary Norris, a copy editor and grammar authority at The New Yorker. “Copy editors will want to make it conventional-looking; fact-checkers want it to be exactly as represented by the composer or the playwright or the writer.”

The cover of “the difficulty of crossing a field.”

The New York Times sometimes, but not always, capitalizes lowercase works; its stylebook lacks a hard-and-fast rule. It does call for following American capitalization rules for the titles of foreign-language works (“Così Fan Tutte,” not “Così fan tutte”); urges avoiding “fanciful” punctuation in company names (“Yahoo,” not “Yahoo!”); and calls for capitalizing only the first letter of acronyms that exceed four letters (“Unicef,” not “UNICEF”).

Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards at The Times, who oversees its style manual, said that the publication should strive to balance the wishes of artists with the grammatical rules it tries to follow, and warned that lowercase titles can look like errors to readers. (Not to mention the difficulty of trying to begin a sentence with a lowercase title.)

But style guides or no, lowercase titles have proliferated in the 21st century, said Janis Susskind, the managing director of Boosey & Hawkes, a prominent music publisher. She said that she sometimes warned composers that their lowercase works would often be printed uppercase against their wishes — or risk disappearing in blocks of text when printed correctly.

“If you’re going to ask me how much influence we have?” she said. “Not a lot.”

Composers sometimes bristle at seeing their titles mangled. “Since one of my biggest concerns as a composer is communicating about something meaningful with the audience, anything that obstructs that communication feels like a lost opportunity to me,” said David T. Little, who has given his works all-lowercase, all-capitalized and other nonstandard titles.

There are suggestions that a backlash, and a post-lowercase era, may be dawning. When the young composer Nico Muhly wrote a blog post a few years ago praising the contemporary ensemble eighth blackbird, he added, “it makes me insane the lower-case-ness.”

And he recalled the “serious typographical crisis” he experienced once while discussing the slew of lowercase works being played at the New York Philharmonic’s (uppercase) new-music series, CONTACT!

“Composers: can we call a halt to the lowercase titles?” Mr. Muhly asked. He elaborated in an email that the only lowercase titles he really loves are by Mr. Lang, “and I feel like everybody should make room for him in that lane.”

The composer Ted Hearne said that he no longer gives his works lowercase titles because he does not believe simply liking the way they looked was a good enough reason to justify it. He even said he sometimes now asks for old lowercase works of his to be capitalized in concert programs.

And the ensemble Mr. Muhly chided, the one formerly known as eighth blackbird? The group, which took its name from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” recently renamed itself. It is now Eighth Blackbird, said Lisa Kaplan, a pianist and founding member, who said that the group decided to make the change last year while refreshing its image with a designer.

“We decided we were not really attached to that any more,” she said in an interview. “And plus, whenever The New York Times prints our name, they never honor it anyway, so why should we bother? It was an era. And we have since moved on.”

To balance the scales a little: To atone for the years when Eighth Blackbird’s name was rendered in a way that ran contrary to its wishes, I would like to apologize on behalf of the new york times.